Medication errors, that is, errors that occur in the ordering, dispensing, and administration of medications, regardless of whether those errors caused injury or not, are a significant consideration in the delivery of healthcare in the institutional setting. Adverse drug events (“ADE”), defined as injuries involving a drug that require medical intervention, and representing some of the most serious medication errors, are responsible for a number of patient injuries and death. Accordingly, healthcare facilities continually search for ways to reduce the occurrence of medication errors.
Various systems and methods are being developed at present to reduce the frequency of occurrence and severity of preventable adverse drug events (“PADE”) and other medication errors. In the administration of medication, focus is typically directed to the following five “rights” or factors: the right patient, the right drug, the right route, the right amount, and the right time. Systems and methods seeking to reduce ADE's and PADE's should take these five rights into consideration.
In many hospitals and clinical laboratories, a bracelet device having the patient's identification, such as his or her name printed thereon, is affixed to a patient upon admittance to the facility in order to identify the patient during his or her entire stay. Despite this safeguard, opportunities arise for patient identification error. For example, when a blood sample is taken from a patient, the blood sample must be identified by manually transcribing the patient's name and other information from the patient's identification bracelet. In transferring the patient's name, a nurse or technician may, instead of actually reading the patient's bracelet, miscopy the name or may rely on memory or a different data source. Moreover, manually transferring other information such as parameters for configuring an infusion pump to dispense medication may result in errors that reduce the accuracy and/or effectiveness of drug administration and patient care. This may result in an increased duration of treatment with an attendant increase in cost.
Hospitals and other healthcare institutions continuously strive to provide quality patient care. The possibility of medical errors, such as where the wrong patient receives the wrong drug at the wrong time, in the wrong dosage, or even where the wrong surgery is performed, is a significant concern for all healthcare facilities. Many prescription drugs and injections are identified merely by slips of paper on which the patient's name and identification number have been hand-written by a nurse or technician who is to administer the treatment. For a variety of reasons, such as the transfer of patients to different beds and errors in marking the slips of paper, the possibility arises that a patient may be given an incorrect treatment. This could be prevented by using an automated system to verify that the patient is receiving the correct care. Various solutions to these problems have been proposed, such as systems that use bar codes to identify patients and medications, or systems allowing the bedside entry of patient data. While these systems have advanced the art significantly, even more comprehensive systems could prove to be of greater value.
Delivery, verification, and control of medication in an institutional setting have traditionally been areas where errors can occur. In a typical facility, a physician enters an order for a medication for a particular patient. This order may be handled either as a simple prescription slip, or it may be entered into an automated system, such as a physician order entry (“POE”) system. The prescription slip or the electronic prescription from the POE system is routed to the pharmacy, where the order is filled, so that the medication can be provided to the patient. Typically, pharmacies check the physician order against possible allergies of the patient and for possible drug interactions in the case where two or more drugs are prescribed, and also check for contraindications. Depending on the facility, the medication may be identified and gathered within the pharmacy and placed into a transport carrier for transport to a nurse station. Once at the nurse station, the prescriptions are again checked against the medications that have been identified for delivery to ensure that no errors have occurred.
Typically, medications are delivered to a nurse station in a drug cart or other carrier that allows a certain degree of security to prevent theft or other loss of medications. In one example, the drug cart or carrier is divided into a series of drawers or containers, each container holding the prescribed medication for a single patient. To access the medication, the nurse must enter the appropriate identification to unlock a drawer, door, or container. In other situations, inventories of commonly-used drugs may be placed in a secure cabinet located in an area at or close by a nurse station. This inventory may contain not only topical medications but oral, IM-, and IV-delivered medications as well. Nurse identification and a medication order number are typically required to gain access to the cabinet.
The nurse station receives a listing of drugs to be delivered to patients at intervals throughout the day. A nurse or other care-giver or other qualified person reads the list of medications to be delivered, and gathers those medications from the inventory at the nurse station. Once all of the medications have been gathered for the patients in the unit for which the nurse station is responsible, one or more nurses then take the medications to the individual patients and administer the dosages.
Common to all of these systems is the nurse who delivers the medication. The nurse is central to the process of verifying that the right medication is given to the right patient in the right dosage at the right time at the point of care. No other person in the facility is situated as well as the nurse delivering the medication to ensure or verify that the appropriate drug is being given to the appropriate patient.
Such a system though may not be capable of thoroughly verifying that the appropriate medication regimen is being delivered to a patient in the case where IV drugs are being delivered. For example, a nurse may carry an IV bag to a particular patient area, hang the bag, program an infusion pump with appropriate treatment parameters, and begin infusion of the medication. The applicable hospital control system, such as the pharmacy information system, may not be informed that the patient has received the medication, and if the information is lost somewhere, the possibility exists of medicating the patient twice. Thus, there may be a break in the link of verification that the medication is being properly delivered to the patient if an event occurs resulting in a deviation from the desired treatment parameters.
Moreover, even where the right medication arrives at the right patient for administration, incorrect administration of the medication may occur where the medication is to be administered using an automated or semi-automated administration device, such as an infusion pump, if the automated device is programmed with incorrect medication administration parameters. For example, even where the medication order includes the correct infusion parameters, those parameters may be incorrectly entered into an infusion pump, causing the infusion pump to administer the medication in a manner that may not result in the prescribed treatment.
One attempt at providing an infusion system with built-in safeguards to prevent the incorrect entry of treatment parameters utilizes hospital-defined drug dosing parameters which are employed by the infusion instrument's software to monitor the infusion parameter entry process and interact with the care-giver should an incorrect entry or an out of range entry be attempted. In such a case, an alert is communicated to the care-giver that the parameter entered is either incorrect or outside of a range established by the institution where care is being provided. The drug dosing parameters consist of hospital-defined values for infusion parameters or other medical treatment guidelines. They may comprise the considered “best practices” of the facility and may be updated from time to time.
Typically, the drug dosing parameters are installed in the device by qualified personnel. However, each type (model) of infusion pump has its own independent software for creating and installing customized drug parameters for that type and model of pump. Thus, the qualified personnel must repeat the customization process for each type of infusion pump used at the institution. Further, each time the institution's guidelines or policies are updated, the drug dosing parameters for each type of infusion pump must be separately updated as well.
In the case of modular systems having a single programming module that controls multiple infusion pumps or infusion pump modules, such as in ALARIS Medical Systems, Inc.'s MEDLEY® Modular Patient Care System, the drug dosing parameters are installed in the programming module, or common Patient Care Unit™ (PCU), and are thereby usable by all the infusion modules attached to the “system”. However, even with this modular system, the customizable drug dosing parameters are limited to use with that particular model. Further, they can only be installed in that model's Patient Care Unit™ (programming module) and not other models or devices manufactured by ALARIS and certainly not the devices of other manufacturers.
While these hospital-defined drug dosing parameters have provided a significant advance in the art for avoiding medication errors, when more than one model of patient care device is used by a hospital, the process for customizing separate databases for each device model requires a significant amount of time by skilled personnel and introduces a risk of inconsistency. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a more accurate and efficient system to create and deploy hospital-defined drug dosing parameters and rules for different models of infusion devices as well as other patient care devices. It would also be advantageous for hospitals as well as manufacturers to be able to develop and implement a single customizable set of drug dosing parameters and rules which may be applied to all the infusion devices and associated monitoring and diagnostic devices and systems in the hospital.
In some cases, diverse types or models of patient care devices may need to communicate with each other for purposes of sharing information. For instance, patient monitoring devices such as vital signs monitors often have the capability of storing transactions from other patient care devices, such as infusion pumps. These monitoring devices typically require the parameters of the other patient care devices so that appropriate correlation, labeling, data validation and storage functions may be provided. Additionally, in cases where the drug dosing parameters further include rule sets representing patient-condition-specific rules and/or algorithms that determine dosing parameter(s) as a function of patient data obtained from other sources in the network, information from one device may be essential to another device that is utilizing the hospital's drug dosing parameters. Further, some devices may alter operation in response to the information received from another device, either in accordance with a drug dosing rule or other operational software in the system or device. For example, the rule for maximum and minimum dose of sodium nitroprusside can be made dependent on the arterial blood pressure measured by a separate instrument. If the mean blood pressure exceeds a predetermined limit or meets a certain categorization such as “high”, then the dosing parameter defining the upper continuous dose limit would be reduced in accordance with the parameters of the dosing rule for that drug within a selected behavior descriptor, as that term will be defined below.
However, each healthcare facility typically has a different inventory of diverse models of patient care devices, many of which are not compatible with each other because they are made by different manufacturers or are otherwise supported by different platforms that use different languages and/or communication protocols to transmit or receive data. Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a universal configuration database from which these diverse devices could easily obtain the needed communication information (e.g. data definitions, rules, protocols, structures, definitions) to support communication with other types of patient care devices. It would also be advantageous if such a system was integrated with the customizable drug dosing parameters and rules as well as the infusion/monitoring instrument's operational configuration parameters.
The operational behavior of many infusion devices are capable of being customized through installation of “configurable operation parameters” including such parameters as alarm limits, maximum rates, selection of operational modes and languages. Depending on the type of infusion device and area in which the device is used, specific settings are needed to provide optimal care. For instance, the neonatology department will prefer a low rate limit, the smallest air bubble detection limit and special settings for pressure and resistance alarms.
For example, many infusion pumps presently available allow users to determine the behavior of the medical device by choosing one of a list of behaviors referred to as “profiles”. The parameters of each “profile” are defined generically as behavior descriptors, the elements of which are selected to provide optimal behavior of the medical device in a specific care area (ICU, OR, etc) or type of medical care (cardiology, oncology). By the operator's selection of a “profile”, the infusion pump or other medical device becomes automatically customized to provide optimal operating features for the patient's in the selected care area. For example, both infusion devices and vital signs monitoring modules may be combined in a single integrated patient care system controlled by a central computer referred to as a PCU. The operational behaviors of monitoring modules include features such as alarm limits and display range. Similar to infusion modules, the behavior of these devices may be customized through the selection of the desired “profile” or ensemble of operating parameters.
A need therefore exists for a hospital-specified configuration database to coordinate all the above features, functions, rules and communication parameters. This “universal” configuration database will integrate individualized infusion device and monitoring device operational parameters together with drug infusion parameters and rules. Hence what has been recognized as a need, and has heretofore been unavailable, is an integrated system for creating and managing customized institutional guidelines for medical treatments usable with a variety of patient care devices to provide accurate, efficient, and cost-effective delivery of health care to patients. Such a system should also be capable of facilitating communication between heterogeneous patient care devices for further integrating the various aspects of patient care such as the operational parameters of infusion devices and monitors. The invention fulfills these needs and others.